Worst In The World: San Marino face the might of Italy

Friday 31 May 2013

San Marino face the might of Italy

Friday 31^st March 2013

Italy v. San Marino

Bologna, Italy

Friendly

The Sammarinese are back in action with a first ever meeting with the nation that surrounds them, the footballing giants of Italy. Anything other than a hefty hammering would be one of the most startling football results of all time. San Marino are pure cannon fodder for Italy ahead of the Azzurri’s upcoming World Cup qualifier with the Czech Republic, and then the Confederations Cup in Brazil.

Italy will however be playing an experimental line-up as explained by their coach Cesare Prandelli.

"We wanted this game because our programme has consisted of four days of work with double training sessions and I needed a test to try new players and see if they can fit in at a tactical level quickly for the Confederations Cup."

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What's This All About?

It’s all too easy to focus on the successful teams in international football, Spain, Brazil, Germany etc. We all know what’s going on with them, usually winning, and can easily follow their crowning glories on the international stage. But what about life at the other end of the scale?

FIFA’s world rankings allow us to easily see who is officially the worst national football team in the world, and this site simply follows that team (or teams) until they manage to drag themselves kicking and screaming from the foot of the world rankings to be replaced by someone even worse. And then we follow them instead.

In the past the FIFA rankings made it clear who was the very worst of all, as the complex ranking formula rarely caused a tie for last place. Since 2006 the formula has been rather simplified, I won’t go into detail but many factors were removed to make things easier to understand. The result though is that down at the bottom of the rankings we often now have a cluster of ineptitude (or should it be a splat of ineptitude?) with several nations judged to equally as useless as each other for the simple reason that they lose all their games. In the past they’d have received some credit for a narrow defeat against a top side, but no more. To get off the bottom they are going to have to win or draw a match, something that often proves beyond most of them.

We’re here to highlight their struggles against hopelessness, and bring the occasional heart warming story of marginal success.